Shadow education as an emerging focus in worldwide curriculum studies

Shadow education as an emerging focus in worldwide curriculum studies

Young Chun Kim, Noel Gough, and Jung-Hoon Jung

https://doi.org/10.18296/cm.0027

Abstract

Shadow education has been studied in areas such as comparative education, educational policy, sociology of education, education and economics, and lifelong education, but mainstream Anglophone curriculum studies have largely ignored this phenomenon. We argue that shadow education should be considered as an emerging (and significant) focus of curriculum studies worldwide and advance five approaches to studying shadow education as an object of transnational curriculum inquiry, including shadow education as historical/political text, auto/biographical text, critical text, ethnic text, and decolonising text. We argue that, because shadow education seems likely to expand, curriculum scholars should seek new understandings that might complicate and complexify both shadow education and mainstream curriculum discourses.

Introduction

The expansion of private supplementary tutoring beyond the hours of mainstream formal schooling has become an increasingly visible phenomenon in many nations. In Asian countries, it is known as “shadow education”, but terms such as “cram schools” (Pinar, 2011), “supplementary education” (Gordon, Bridglall, & Meroe, 2003), and “private tuition” (Foondun, 2002) are commonplace in Anglophone nations. Mori and Baker (2010, p. 39) report numerous studies that show it is “occurring at the worldwide level”. The traditional form of shadow education—one-to-one tutoring—has expanded, and to some extent been supplanted, by large-scale industries including internet-based tutoring and before- and after-school programmes. Mori and Baker (2010, p. 37) observe that shadow education in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore has been pervasive and that it “was also thought to be the ‘secret ingredient’ in some Asian nations’ relative high performance” on large-scale cross-national comparisons of achievement tests.

Shadow education in the Asian diaspora of other nations is also evident. For example, Ho and Wang (2016) trace the histories of Chinese com­munity schools in Auckland, New Zealand, from the 1960s, describ­ing them as a “new wave” of education. Examples include Auckland Chinese Community Centre Inc., Browns Bay Chinese Community School, New­market Afterschool Chinese programme, and Wakaaranga Afterschool Chinese programme, to name a few. These community schools provide a variety of before- and after-school programmes including Chinese lan­guage, China-focused extracurricular activities, and academic pro­grammes in English and mathematics. Although some scholars (e.g., Cummings, 1997) characterise shadow education in East Asian countries as an “exotic” cultural practice, ethnic influences are no longer the only driving forces because, as Mark Bray’s (1999, 2011) empirical studies demonstrate, shadow education is pervasive worldwide.

Shadow education has received considerable attention in research areas such as comparative education (Mori & Baker, 2010; Ventura & Jang, 2010), educational policy (Bray & Kwo, 2014; Ireson, 2004; Park, Buchmann, Choi, & Merry, 2016), sociology of education (Byun, 2010; Yamamoto & Brinton, 2010), economics (Entrich, 2014; Zhang, 2013), and lifelong education (Ozaki, 2015). Most of this research focuses on what Bray and Kwo (2014, p. 2) call the “backwash” of shadow education. For example, because shadow education is a form of privatisation in which educational choices depend upon familial financial circumstances, it is often accused of reproducing educational inequalities (Stevenson & Baker, 1992) and even of being a form of corruption of the education system. For example, Foondun (2002) observes that teachers in Mauritius display conflicts of interest by favouring their private tutoring services. Education authorities in some nations have responded to such abuses by trying to “control” (de Castro & de Guzman, 2014) or “eliminate” private tutoring services (see especially Kim’s [2016] history of shadow education in South Korea). We argue that a control-oriented approach to shadow education is problematic, not only because no nation has achieved their desire to control it (even the dictatorship of Jeonghee Park in South Korea failed to do so), but also because the approach fails to understand why many students and their parents “buy into” and support shadow-education enterprises.

Despite extensive research in some education subdisciplines, shadow education has received little attention from curriculum scholars, who have not addressed such issues as: how students study in the shadow education environment; what curricular characteristics attract students and parents to shadow education; what forms it takes in different contexts; and how it affects children’s development. With these questions in mind, we argue that shadow education is an emerging, albeit perhaps troubling, focus for curriculum inquiry. Shadow education complexifies, rather than simplifies, understandings of curriculum. Curriculum, broadly conceived as the totality of a student’s experiences in the course of the student’s education, is not confined to what happens in classrooms and schools but must also take account of what happens outside schools. If students’ learning cannot be fully understood without investigating shadow education, then we need to address three sets of research questions:

(1)Why should shadow education be an object of curriculum inquiry?

(2)In what forms of shadow education do students participate to enhance their academic achievement and succeed in future college/university entrance examinations? How does each form function? What does each form contribute to understanding curriculum writ large?

(3)What kinds of curricular approaches and questions are generated by including shadow education as a focus of curriculum inquiry?

What aspects of shadow education make it as an appropriate object of curriculum inquiry?

Shadow education is a significant object of curriculum inquiry for a number of reasons. Firstly, students in many countries participate in shadow education, which means that schools (whether public or private) are not the only places in which students learn. Shadow education is prominent in some East Asian countries. For example, in South Korea, 67.8% of public school students take shadow education classes (Statistics Korea, 2016). A 2010 study found that 73.5% of Hong Kong secondary students received private tutoring (Caritas Community and Higher Education Service, 2010). Similarly, in Japan, private tutoring attendance by elementary and lower secondary students in 2007 was respectively 25.9% and 53.5% (Dawson, 2010). Shadow education is also prevalent in South Asia, Southern Europe, and some parts of North Africa and is growing in other areas including Sub-Saharan Africa, North America, South America, and Western Europe (for statistical data, see Bray & Kwo, 2014). New Zealand is one of the countries in which the rate of shadow education is presently among the lowest, with a participation rate of approximately 24% among 15-year-old students (Entrich, 2017). Shadow education is also growing in Canada, and, based on their study in Ontario, Aurini and Davies (2004, p. 419) argue that “this massively growing industry is expanding its reach … These businesses are becoming increasingly school-like … to provide a fuller alternative to regular public schooling”. In some instances, the status of shadow education might have overtaken that of public schools. For example, Yang and Kim (2010, p. 117) note the “phenomenon of inverted roles” between public education and shadow education insofar as students do assignments given by private tutoring institutes in their school classrooms. Such “inverted roles” have also been observed in India, where Paramita’s (2015, p. 819) ethnographic study reveals that students “follow the private tutors not the teachers”. Aurini and Davies (2004) contend that shadow education has become “school-like” for many students. Such studies lead us to suggest that shadow education is not only a near-universal phenomenon but also that in many circumstances it is at least as important as schools for students’ education.

Secondly, in many cases shadow education contributes to students’ aca­demic achievement. Its effectiveness for enhancing students’ achieve­ment is seen in many countries including South Korea (Lee, 2007; Park, 2008), Japan (Mori & Baker, 2010), Bangladesh (Nath, 2008), Sri Lanka (Pallegedara, 2011), and Canada (Davies & Guppy, 2010). A Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report con­firms the contributions of shadow education to students’ achievement in countries such as Japan, Singapore, and Canada, acknowledging that “private education plays an important role in mobilising resources from a wider range of funding sources and is sometimes also considered a way of making education more cost-effective” (OECD, 2012, p. 70). Carr and Wang (2015, p. 1) found that after-school programmes have a positive impact on “improving students’ academic outcomes, promoting a more equitable school system without sacrificing the mental wellbeing of students”. However, shadow education is not a panacea for every student. Ireson (2004, p. 109) presents a mixed picture of its effectiveness and argues that “quality indicators should be added to analyses”.

Thirdly, curriculum materials include not only those that public education provides, but also those sourced by or through private providers. Many students, especially in some East Asian countries, have greater access to shadow education resources than to those provided by public schools (Kim, 2016). They do so because the curriculum materials provided by public education are usually designed for one grade or developmental level and are thus seen as less helpful for advanced or accelerated learning and for remedial learning. Thus, the workbooks, reference books, and other materials developed by shadow education providers are welcomed by many students (Aurini & Davies, 2004; Kim, 2016). In some places, such as the United States, the private sector even provides curricular materials to the public sector (Ball, Thrupp, & Forsey, 2010). Major franchised companies such as Kumon and Sylvan offer much more systematic and targeted programmes than does public education. For example, Kim & Kim (2012, p. 25) analysed shadow education materials and found that “the materials are not designed merely for rote learning based on repetition; they are systematically and meticulously designed to guide students’ learning”. Sylvan, for instance, has developed numerous materials in reading, writing, and studying with the aim of students acquiring the basic skills, rather than immediately increasing students’ grades. Yang and Kim (2010) observe that, in South Korea, even in public schools, students study with materials from private tutoring institutes.

Finally, understanding shadow education is crucial for grasping the whole picture of education, and, more importantly, students’ develop­ment. In other words, shadow education is another space which can be an indispensable part of students’ lives. From the perspective of Bronfenbrenner’s (1976, p. 5) ecology of education, we argue that curriculum inquiry cannot be restricted to schools but must also be carried out in “real-life educational settings”. Shadow education is a microsystem of education that interacts with other constituents of the ecology of education, including family, schools, communities, and larger social structures. Bray and Kobakhidze (2015, p. 477) argue that “the rise of tutoring in Hong Kong has significantly changed the ecosystem”. In the same vein, the prevalence of shadow education in South Korea has forced the Ministry of Education to install after-school programmes provided by private tutoring institutes (Choi & Cho, 2016). Research specifically into how shadow education influences child development presents a largely negative picture: for example, extended studying time and excessive involvement in private tutoring may be detrimental to students’ development (Mori & Baker, 2010) because they sacrifice sleep for study (Gillen-O’Neel, Huynh, & Fuligni, 2013) and Paton (2014) quotes the president of the National Association of Head Teachers (UK) as claiming it “is like child abuse”. Yet, there are counter-narratives. Carr and Wang (2015) found positive roles for after-school programmes. Kim and Kim (2012) also narrate students’ desire to learn more and their willingness to sacrifice sleep for their future. We argue that a more nuanced approach is needed to understand the relationship between children’s academic development and their intellectual, biographical, and social development.

Five forms of shadow education

In this section, we discuss five forms of shadow education based on, but not limited to, Bray’s (2011) categorisation of one-to-one, small group, and classroom-based types. Bray’s categorisation is helpful for recognising that there are multiple types of shadow education around the world. However, we learnt from our field research and the existing literature that the categorisations of shadow education are limiting in that they are based chiefly on student–teacher ratios. To provide a more flexible frame for curriculum inquiry, we identify five forms of shadow education.

Private tutoring institute

A private tutoring institute is the most school-like form of shadow education insofar as it has its own physical space, classrooms, and buildings, and its own curriculum, instruction, and assessment/evaluation strategies. A typical schedule at such an institute, with some variations between school levels, is that students attend classes three times a week during the school term and every day during summer and winter vacations (Kim, 2016). Classes at a private tutoring institute tend to be smaller than school classes, usually seven to 15 students in a class. Class divisions and student mobility based on a student’s level in each learning area are salient characteristics. Recently, many of the institutes have become franchised. Such institutes are called hakwons in South Korea (Kim, 2016), juku in Japan (Ozaki, 2015), buxiban in Taiwan (Bray & Lykins, 2012); and centres, tutoring centres, academies, or institutes in Anglophone countries.

Home-visit private tutoring

Home-visit private tutoring is the most individualised form of shadow education, as it has a ratio of one student to one instructor. The instruction is tailored to the individual student’s strengths and weaknesses, and the focus is on accommodating the student’s academic ability and pace. Decisions on what and how to teach are based mainly on the family’s requests. Home-visit private tutoring takes place at the student’s home, which means that the student saves time that may otherwise be wasted in travelling. This form of shadow education is used mostly by middle class and relatively wealthy families because the tuition is higher than any other forms (Kim, 2016). It is called gwawoe in South Korea, katei homon in Japan, and one-to-one tutoring or private home tuition in Anglophone countries. Recognising the need for and effectiveness of this form of shadow education, private companies such as First Tutors and School Tutoring Academy have emerged.¹

Internet-based private tutoring

Internet-based private tutoring combines the advantages of private tutoring and highly developed internet technologies. This form of shadow education helps students and private tutoring institutes overcome geographical and temporal barriers and meet individual students’ academic levels and learning paces. Although it mainly provides online lectures in subject areas, it sometimes offers downloadable lessons. Nowadays, the internet also makes possible instant online communication between students and instructors. Ventura and Jang (2010, p. 59) argue that this is “progressively growing private tutoring … [under] globalisation and offshoring” of the enterprise. Internet-based tutoring companies hire top class instructors, who sometimes gain icon status as “God Tutors” (a Cantonese expression) in Hong Kong (Cheng, 2007). With its ubiquity and relatively low tuition costs, this type of shadow education is growing exponentially (Cheng, 2007).

Subscribed learning programme

A subscribed learning programme is a highly standardised and systematic tutoring programme provided by large, franchised enterprises such as Kumon, Red Pen, Purunet, and Nunnoppi.¹ The companies develop their own materials using their own curricular and instructional strategies. The materials are delivered via mail, and students follow them step-by-step at their own pace at home. The companies send tutors to students’ homes once a week. Different from home-visit private tutoring, the role of tutors in this form of shadow education is to evaluate each student’s progress and degree of understanding, guide the next assignments, and help them to deal with other issues related to subject matter and learning strategies. The learning materials are called haksupji (literally, “learning-paper”) in South Korea (Kim, 2012); this form, kumon, originated in Japan in the 1950s and has enjoyed “a spectacular ascent” in many countries (Aurini & Davies, 2004) and operates today in 49 countries, including New Zealand.

After-school programmes

An after-school programme is “a set of student-centred learning and de­velop­ment activities which are school-based operations but are not a part of the regular curriculum” (Ministry of Education and Science and Technology [South Korea], 2012). Historically, as Halpern (1999) notes, such programmes provided supervised learning in educational environments to students whose parents were not available to take care of them after-school hours, and with the hope of reducing demand for other forms of shadow education. But the growing emphasis on accountability in the United States, together with increasing demand from students and parents in South Korea, led to these programmes expanding their focus on improving student academic performance (Bae & Jeon, 2013). After-school programmes exist in countries such as the United States (Afterschool Alliance, 2008), Japan (Yamamoto, & Brinton, 2010), South Korea (Kim, 2016), and New Zealand (Youthtown, 2015). After-school programmes are among the more diverse forms of shadow education in terms of their purposes and activities because after-school programmes can actualise various sociocultural aspects of learning. For example, in South Korea, after-school programmes are directed towards enhancing the student’s academic achievement, whereas in New Zealand there are more sports-based activities in which students can build social networks.

Perspectives for curriculum inquiry in shadow education

Conceiving shadow education as a reality of students’ learning questions the existing image of curriculum. Shadow education adds to what Deleuze (1994, p. 269) might call “the distribution of difference” in educational provision and thereby encourage explorations that are “nomadic rather than sedentary or fixed” (see, also, Gough & Sellers, 2016). In this respect, we suggest that stereotyping shadow education as detrimental, consumerist, or deviant could hinder the generation of new understandings. Considering shadow education as a component of a nomadic curriculum discourse might provide opportunities for understanding curriculum, students’ learning and lives, and the politics and history of curriculum differently. Informed by Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman’s (1995) approach to understanding curriculum as text, we suggest new research questions and perspectives that can be deployed to generate further understandings.

Shadow education as historical/political curriculum text

The mainstream discourses of public education are reluctant to accept shadow education as a curriculum, and it has suffered denial, rejection, and marginalisation under the political project that constructs it as a mere “shadow”. To understand political/historical subtexts around shadow education, we can raise questions such as:

•How has shadow education emerged and developed from supple­mentary to competing with (or overtaking) public education in different countries?

•In what ways has shadow education been conceptualised and repre­sented by educators, administrators, curriculum researchers, and social media?

Understanding shadow education requires that we understand its historicity. The significance of historical study in the etymology and reconstruction of the term “curriculum” is emphasised and exemplified by, for example, Pinar et al. (1995). Yet, there is little research on how it has emerged and subsequently developed. For example, Fung (2012, p. 185) laments that “there is no documented history of cram schools in Hong Kong”. For shadow education to develop as a sustained object of academic study, its history must be investigated to help us to understand how we have arrived at the current situation and reveal how our current understandings might change. The only extant research that has thoroughly documented a history of shadow education is Young Chun Kim’s (2016) Shadow Education and the Curriculum and Culture of Schooling in South Korea, which traces its 100-year history in that country.

A key question for curriculum scholars is to explore how shadow education has become marginalised “based only upon the assertion and reassertion of identity” (Said, 1993, p. 457) and why it is perceived so negatively (Choi & Cho, 2016). The term “shadow education” represents it as subordinate or inferior to public education and positions it as antagonistic to public education that needs to be tightly controlled (de Castro & de Guzman, 2014) or eliminated (Kim, 2016), due to its alleged role in reproducing existing inequalities (Bray & Kwo, 2014). Curriculum scholars might therefore need to inquire as to why shadow education has been characterised so negatively by the mainstream, such as in Foondun’s (2002, p. 509) assertion of the “evils of private tuition”, and Bray & Kobakhidze’s (2015, p. 476) characterisation of it as an “invasive species [of education]”. These accusations are suspicious because counter-narratives show ways in which shadow education is helpful and has a positive impact on students’ learning and their society (Entrich, 2017): for example, Sun and Braeye (2012) found that it plays a crucial role in keeping alive certain ethnicities and cultures in some diasporas.

The politically constructed representation of shadow education can be under­stood as a denigration, and many supporters of it reject such an identity. It might seem natural for shadow education to be viewed negatively given that public schooling has for so long been a priority. Their unequal positions suggest that using Foucault’s (1997) tools of genealogies and archaeologies of knowledge and power in historical investigation of shadow education might reveal the power/knowledge manoeuvres around it and uncover images of it that might challenge the functionality of the power. Understanding shadow education as political/historical text might thereby change the dynamics of power surrounding it.

Shadow education as auto/biographical curriculum text

Approaching shadow education as auto/biographical text is to understand participating students’ learning and development through the perspectives of “lived experience”, and Pinar’s (1994) method of currere (the Latin root of “curriculum” in its infinitive form, coined by Pinar [1975] to name autobiographical inquiry of one’s experience). As we have shown, shadow education is an important educational space. Experiences of shadow education can greatly influence students’ education and intellectual, emotional, and social development, as Kassotakis and Verdis (2013) found in Greece. The functionality of shadow education goes beyond improving test-taking skills through rote learning. Via shadow education, students learn knowledge, values, and attitudes towards learning; self-management skills; and social skills as Hartmann (2013) discusses with respect to Egypt. Previous research on shadow education is limiting because the predominantly quantitative research has not identified the complexities of students’ subjective experiences. Thus, we suggest that students’ lives and their educational experiences in shadow education should be studied from the perspective of curriculum as auto/biographical text and propose these research questions:

•How does shadow education contribute to a student’s overall edu­cation­al progress and achievement?

•How does shadow education influence individual students’ social and emotional development?

•What are the negative consequences of shadow education on students’ learning and development, especially in circumstances in which it emphasises increasing school grades and obtaining admission to a tertiary institution?

Research in this area is emerging, and some studies report negative influences on students. For example, Bray (2013, p. 27) argues that shadow education in Hong Kong puts excessive pressure on young people, which diminishes “psychological well-being” and “socio-emotional development”. Similar findings have been reported for South Korean students (Oh My News, 2012). On the other hand, the positive influences on students mentioned in the previous section have also been reported. Thus, research reveals a mixed picture. It is important to note that the effects of shadow education are not limited to academic performance. We know very little about how it influences students’ identity formation or subjective reconstruction of their experience of it, and how it contributes to or constrains students’ intellectual and biographical development.

Understanding how students construct and reconstruct their lived experi­ence in shadow education requires us to seek much richer data (thick descriptions) than what is testable, quantifiable, or easily observable. We must try to understand how students experience shadow education in their “inner lives” by, for example, deploying phenomenological approaches that seek to understand the essence and particularities of students’ experiences through their eyes. Currere (Pinar, 2015, p. 39) can also provide ways to approach our inner worlds, by allowing us to “sketch the relations among school [and shadow education] knowledge, life history, and intellectual development in ways that might function self-transformatively”. Through efforts to understand shadow education as auto/biographical text, we may better be able to understand its significance and meanings in a learner’s biography and intellectual life.

Shadow education as critical curriculum text

Much empirical research argues that shadow education contributes to reproducing social inequalities by providing better educational oppor­tunities for students from economically privileged families (Dawson, 2010). Thus, it functions as a medium through which the social and cultural capital of families is effectively delivered to students (Park, Lim, & Choi, 2015; Sun & Braeye, 2012). This proposition is supported by empirical research that shows higher demand for shadow education in higher socioeconomic status (SES) families, and the positive relation between the intensity of shadow education students and their academic achievements, which often results in the accusation that it is a major cause of educational inequality (Lee, Lee, & Jang, 2010). Yet, there are differences among countries in terms of the participation rates among low, middle, and high SES families. For example, South Korea has relatively large differences, whereas there are smaller differences in New Zealand. In nations such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the United States students from low SES families had higher participation rates in shadow education (Kim, 2013).

H. Kim (2015) argues that there is a positive relation between familial invest­ment in shadow education and entrance rates for presti­gious schools in South Korea which is “related to … more money spent for pri­vate tutoring” (Kim & Park, 2010, p. 88) by higher SES families. This understanding convinces us to problematise shadow education as critical text by stressing the necessity of conducting research on its roles in capitalist countries.

Despite the empirical findings on the roles of shadow education, research to date does not lead us beyond the fact that students’ achievement and the distribution of educational resources are heavily influenced by family background. We are troubled that we are repeatedly asking the same question, because there is little research that looks closely into the functionality of shadow education to address questions such as:

•How do certain students obtain access to more effective shadow education institutes or tutors?

•How do middle and high SES families use their social capital to provide their students with better shadow education resources?

•How are students’ learning and progress planned, tracked, or managed so that they can enter prestigious middle schools, high schools, or universities?

•How do shadow education institutes or tutors strengthen individual students’ desire and passion for studying, perhaps for students of wealthy families?

Efforts to understand shadow education as critical curriculum text might tell us more about how it produces such an impact on students’ learning and strengthens/reduces existing educational gaps. These critical questions are important because shadow education enterprises, being businesses intended to be profitable, will continue to provide services based on the tuition fees that families can afford. Therefore, there always will be issues of educational inequality in shadow education as long as it exists. More rigorous study from critical perspectives might help us to deal with such issues.

Shadow education as ethnic/cultural curriculum text

Reading shadow education as ethnic/cultural curriculum text seeks to identify and understand its educational significances and meanings in multicultural and multiethnic contexts. Many have wondered why students with particular ethnic and cultural backgrounds, especially children of East Asian immigrants, outperform other ethnic groups in the United States (Schneider & Lee, 1990; Zhou, 2008; Zhou & Kim, 2006), Canada (Sun & Braeye, 2012), and New Zealand (Ho & Wang, 2016). Zhou’s (2008) ethnographic study found that ethnic communities in Los Angeles constitute a crucial educational environment especially for East Asian students who outperform other ethnic groups in the area. Zhou (2008, p. 229) attributes the success of the students to the “ethnic system”, the ethnic social environment, which Lee and Zhou (2015) call “ethnic capital”. Qualitative research in Canada by Sun and Braeye (2012) produced similar results to Zhou’s analysis, as did Ho and Wang (2016) in New Zealand. Thus, understanding why and how students of Asian origin (such as Chinese and Korean) outperform other students in host nations requires us to learn how shadow education works in such communities. We propose the following questions for considering shadow education as ethnic text:

•What is the role of shadow education in the success of students in East Asian communities?

•What ethnic elements—cultural values, knowledge, and norms—make shadow education more prevalent in such communities than in other communities in Western nations?

•How has shadow education used by particular ethnic groups been understood and represented in mainstream society?

•How can we conceptualise shadow education in such communities as an influential agency for creating another image of model minority students?

In trying to explain why shadow education has been so strong in East Asian communities, some researchers have attributed students’ success to Confucian values of respect for learning, diligence, and effort (see Sun & Braeye, 2012). Zhou (2008, p. 242) argues that the educational environment supported by these ethnic groups works to increase students’ academic success. However, this explanation is questioned by Fung (2012, p. 190), who found differences in the characteristics and functionalities of shadow education between Chinese communities in different locations and argues that attributing students’ success to Confucian culture and/or specific cultural codes is a limiting explanation, which risks falling into “cultural normalization”.

Such ethnic/cultural influences may be manifested as a tension in shadow education. For example, Zhou and Kim (2006) found “relative functionalism” in Asian American educational achievement and social mobility. That is, Asian Americans were constrained by the structures of opportunity for social mobility in noneducational areas such as politics, sports, and entertainment. The “blocked mobility” allows them to invest more in education and “disproportionately succeed in it” (Zhou & Kim, 2006, p. 5). Ho and Wang’s (2016, p. 204) study of Chinese community schools in New Zealand found another tension in that these schools function as a space for “legitimate peripheral participation” in order to become competent students in the mainstream schools, and full members of the New Zealand community in the future. Their research also revealed “a lack of commitment to further develop Chinese language competency due to the demanding senior school requirements and limited option choice in New Zealand” as many students stop Chinese language learning after Year 8. This might seem surprising, given that learning languages is one of the key curriculum areas in the New Zealand education system. Thus, they suggest that New Zealand education policies should include “language programmes … providing afterschool courses to help migrants maintain their identity and develop non-native speakers’ interest in learning languages” (Ho & Wang, 2016, p. 205).

Shadow education as decolonising curriculum text

Shadow education as decolonising text questions existing under­stand­ings and representations of it as non-Western curriculum texts (Jung, 2018), which have, as Ozaki (2015) suggests, been constructed from Western perspectives. This project does not only add the perspectives of subaltern people to global discourses, but also seeks to transform the internal formation of shadow education in the psyche of the non-West. The significance of producing local knowledges and their dialectical relationships with global discourses has been theorised extensively in curriculum studies (see, for example, Gough, 2003, 2014). Yet, as Kanu (2006) argues, curriculum inquiry that deploys the “postcolonial imagination” in conceptualising curriculum as a cultural practice has not proliferated, and we need to obtain more theoretical and practical insights. Thus, we suggest the following questions as focuses for this approach:

•How can scholars in East Asian countries, as insiders, reconceptualise shadow education, by studying “hidden” cultural elements that might not be discernible to outsiders?

•What ideas, concepts, and cultural elements from East Asia can be used to theorise shadow education as a decolonising curriculum text?

•How is shadow education represented by Western ideology, and to what extent is this ideology embedded in non-Western nations’ discourses?

•How does understanding shadow education as decolonising curriculum text challenge or disrupt its existing image?

As Ozaki (2015) argues, the images of shadow education in both West and East have largely been constructed from a Western standpoint. For instance, Seth (2002) characterises the pursuit of education in South Korea as an “education fever”, which has driven the uptake of shadow education in several East Asian countries. This image is constructed from a critical perspective on the roles of shadow education in reproducing social inequalities, but it is also a pejorative term: “fever” is usually something one wants to avoid, and thereby produces a negative image of education in these nations. Yet “education fever” can also refer to enthusiasm, desire, and respect for education. We are troubled by this discourse because the negative image of East Asian shadow education projected by Western scholars might occlude alternative understandings. This project recognises the importance of “place” that Kincheloe and Pinar (1991) theorise, which emphasises the specificity of dynamic local histories, cultures, and other distinctive ways in which the historicity and culture of a place is enacted and embodied by the lives of its populace. Focusing on the context does not necessarily mean enhancing provincialism, but rather promoting “localness”. As Gough (2003, p. 54, emphasis in original) argues, “Thinking locally and recognising its localness enhances rather than diminishes its potential contribution to international knowledge work.”

This perspective conceives shadow education in East Asian countries as emerging and diversifying cultural capital. For example, a relatively recent shadow education-related cultural phenomenon emerges in Park et al.’s (2015, p. 5) study of South Korean “Gangnam mothers”, who work individually or collectively to find the best education-related information in order to get their child the most suitable educational support. One implication of their study for understanding shadow education as decolon­ising text is that it is a space in which multiple agents create a new culture of education through active engagement with others. How this emerging culture will affect or interact with shadow education is largely a matter of speculation. Representing shadow education in South Korea as “educational fever” is a Western (i.e., colonialist) construction of the Other which we need to go beyond. In this respect, the strategies that indigenous peoples can use in decolonising research methodologies (see, for example, Smith, 2013) might also inform the project of understanding shadow education as decolonising text.

Conclusion

There is little research on shadow education in the field of curriculum studies, whereas it has received much scholarly attention in other fields such as comparative education, lifelong education, the sociology of education, and educational administration and policy studies. Given the direction of shadow education in many countries, we argue that without subjecting it to rigorous study, specifically its curricular significance, our efforts to understand how contemporary students learn will necessarily be incomplete. Whether we can negotiate the intersections between shadow education and public education is an open question. Its importance is made obvious by recent research, but the specifics of students’ learning in that domain, such as which aspects of shadow education attract and satisfy students, what types of shadow education exist, and the potential research topics and areas to be explored in that space are largely unknown. We argue for a departure from preoccupations with inquiry focused on public school curricula that ignore shadow education as a new reality, and we have therefore attempted to theorise shadow education as a new research focus of transnational curriculum inquiry. To do so, we have suggested what kinds of perspectives can be used and what kinds of questions can be asked.

We argue that shadow education can be a new area for worldwide curriculum studies insofar as it has been marginalised from mainstream discourses and largely considered to be a non-Western phenomenon. Given its focus on learning and achievement, which is also the raison d’être of formal education, we confidently predict that shadow education will continue to be desired by students and parents and will be incorporated increasingly into the ecology of education in many nations. In this regard, we as curriculum researchers must make the effort to produce new insights and knowledge of shadow education.

Notes

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The authors

Young Chun Kim is a professor in the Department of Education at Chinju National University of Education, Republic of Korea. His research includes curriculum theorising, qualitative research, cultural studies, and postcolonial and transnational curriculum studies.

Email: pedakim@cue.ac.kr

Noel Gough is Professor Emeritus and Foundation Professor of Outdoor and Environ­mental Education at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. His teaching, research, and publications focus on research methodology and curriculum studies, with particular reference to environmental education, science education, internationalisation, and globalisation.

Email: N.Gough@latrobe.edu.au

Jung-Hoon Jung (corresponding author) teaches in the Department of Education of Chonnam National University, Republic of Korea. His research interests include curriculum theorising, teacher education, inter-cultural studies, and autobiographical inquiry. His works resist, theoretically and practically, the instrumental rationality in education.

Email: dalinwill@gmail.com

1First Tutors is located in the UK and provides services in countries such as the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa. School Tutoring Academy is located in the US and provides services in the US and Canada.

2Kumon is a Japanese company that provides services in 49 countries across the world. Red Pen is a Korean company that sells its contents to 69 countries around the world. Purunet is a Korean-based company. Nunnoppi, also known as E.nopi or Eye Level Learning, is a Korean company that provides services in 25 countries.